This isn’t the first time some Americans are alarmed about balloons from nations with anti-U.S. tensions.
Between November 1944 and April 1945, more than 9,000 incendiary “balloon bombs” were launched by Japan during the war in hopes of sparking fear, chaos and forest fires in the Western U.S.
They succeeded.
About 300 of them ultimately were found or observed on the American mainland. Some researchers estimate that the true number of balloon bombs reaching the U.S. was about 1,000.
One actually delivered a fatal blow to civilians in 1945 when it blew up in Bly, Oregon, killing six Americans — a mother with an unborn child and five other children, age 11-13.
It was the only known instance of U.S. civilians on the mainland to die at the hands of an enemy during World War II.
Aviation expert Robert C. Mikesh wrote in the Smithsonian Annals of Flight in 1973 that the balloon bombs have an important role in the evolution of modern warfare, even though the devices were crude and relied simply on the jetstream to get them across the Pacific. He wrote in Japan’s World War II Balloon Bomb Attacks on North America that they were essentially the world the first successful intercontinental weapons, long before missiles capable of strikes across the globe became a mainstay in the Cold War, and still today.
“The strategy of large-scale modern warfare, which leans very heavily upon the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, may well have been touched off by the epic attack of the Doolittie Raiders against Tokyo in April 1942,” Mikesh wrote.
“Ironically, this mission also sparked the invention of the world’s first intercontinental weapon. The concept of balloon bombs might have changed the course of the war in favor of the Japanese had it been pursued with more vigor and tenacity.”
